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Recovering damaged harddisk

II_Echelon_II
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Dear Linustechtips'ers,

 

I've got a problem...

Last night i tried to boot my laptop (which was in sleep mode before), but i instantly got a bluescreen.

After rebooting it automaticly started recovering the disk and seconds after it started the screen turned black.

I know Windows 8 is notorious for getting  a black screen after things like an update or whatever and normally it's just a matter of waiting it out, but this time it just did nothing.

The disk doesn't make any weird noises and starts spinning as normal, so i don't suspect it to be a physical problem.

Things i've tried so far:

  • Booting in CMD or Safe Mode, but this can only be enabled in Windows 8 itself...
  • Putting the HDD in another pc. A windows 7 machine wouldn't even boot and a windows 8 machine began autorecovering the disk, which did completely nothing.
  • Booting the laptop with a Ubuntu Live CD. Linux booted well, so it's not a hardware problem (besides the disk itself), but when i try to open the disk from Linux, it says it found a corrupted version of Windows and it can't acces the disk. Which i thought was weird, because i'm on a Linux machine.

Any help is welcome

 

Greetings,

 

II_Echelon_II

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I'd stick it in the PC boot into windows 7 and try and get all the data off it and then reformat and reinstall windows

Or did you try that already cant quite tell?

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I'd stick it in the PC boot into windows 7 and try and get all the data off it and then reformat and reinstall windows

Or did you try that already cant quite tell?

 

Yeah, if i stick it in a Windows 7 machine (as secondary disc) it doesnt boot at all, and in a Windows 8 machine it start recovering the disc, which doesn't do anything either.

When i try to reach the disk from Ubuntu i get an error saying it can't open the disc, because there is a faulty Windows 8 installation on the disk and it can't be opened.

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I don't understand why if you put the disk into the windows 7 machine and tried to boot windows 7 why it wouldn't boot are you selecting the disk with windows 7 installed and not the disk with the issues?

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I don't understand why if you put the disk into the windows 7 machine and tried to boot windows 7 why it wouldn't boot are you selecting the disk with windows 7 installed and not the disk with the issues?

Yes, it has the working disk selected as boot driver, but whenever the broken one is attached as secondary it just hangs after POST...

With Windows 8, it also hangs after POST, but after a while it start auto recovering the secondary disk.

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As it's SATA, you might be able to turn on the PC and then plug in the HDD. 

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As it's SATA, you might be able to turn on the PC and then plug in the HDD. 

Also tried this, the drive just doesn't show up as a connected device even though the drive is spinning.

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Also tried this, the drive just doesn't show up as a connected device even though the drive is spinning.

 

Looked in Disk Management? It might be showing up, but it might need a drive letter assigned. If that fails, boot into a live Ubuntu DVD (or your favourite Linux distro) and then try and see if you can get some data off it. Good luck!

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Posted (edited)

Also tried this, the drive just doesn't show up as a connected device even though the drive is spinning.

If the drive is not showing up in Disk Management (and you have AHCI enabled on your desktop, providing hot-swap support), then the drive is probably trashed.

Edited by JohnnyGrey
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Looked in Disk Management? It might be showing up, but it might need a drive letter assigned. If that fails, boot into a live Ubuntu DVD (or your favourite Linux distro) and then try and see if you can get some data off it. Good luck!

 I'll try looking in disk management as soon as i get home, and i've tried de Linux thing already (as i've explained above).

I'll also try some (bootable) data recovery software, so i can bypass an OS to get acces to my disk.

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I'm sorry to bring this old topic up again, but i fixed my problem, and wanted to post the solution in case someone else ever stumbles upon this topic.

 

First i ran a Windows installation disk and in the first screen that pops up i pressed shift+f10 to get into cmd. I ran some bootrec commands (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/nl).

The disk still didn't boot, but now a at least my pc didn't freeze if i put it in as secondary disk.

After that i ran Seagate's recovery software (My disk is from Seagate, but it should work on any) and this finally made it possible to recover my files.

Fixing the windows installation just wasn't possible.

 

Thanks!

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